Supreme emergency: How Britain lives with the Bomb

By Andrew Corbett

In Supreme emergency, an ex-Trident submarine captain considers the evolution of UK nuclear deterrence policy and the implications of a previously unacknowledged aversion to military strategies that threaten civilian casualties. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book provides a unique synthesis of the factors affecting British nuclear policy decision-making and draws parallels between government debates about reprisals for First World War zeppelin raids on London, the strategic bombing raids of the Second World War and the evolution of the UK nuclear deterrent. It concludes that among all the technical factors, an aversion to being seen to condone civilian casualties has inhibited government engagement with the public on deterrence strategy since 1915.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526147370

Book preview

Introduction

An insider’s view

I am not an ethicist, but I have given a great deal of thought to the morality of the use of force and, in particular, the concept of nuclear deterrence. I have served in Polaris and Trident ballistic-missile submarines (ship – submersible, ballistic, nuclear or SSBN) on and off since 1986, including command of two Vanguard Class submarines, HMS Vengeance and HMS Vanguard, between 2003 and 2007. I therefore have had ample opportunity, and motivation, to reconcile the full potential of my personal responsibilities with some kind of moral compass.

I was always content with the ethical and strategic aspects of my responsibilities, and I would discuss them with my ship’s company, but I could never be sure that I could articulate them in terms of which the Ministry of Defence (MOD) would approve. So, I asked within my ‘command chain’; fruitlessly. In hindsight, frustration at the inability of the MOD to provide official guidance to the commanding officer of an SSBN ultimately led me here; if the MOD cannot articulate the official rationale for the UK’s Strategic Nuclear Deterrent to its own SSBN commanding officers, what does that say for its ability to make a coherent argument in public? In the absence of formal guidance, I considered the available contemporary academic literature. The rather binary options available seemed initially to be that either all those involved in the business of deterrence were acting immorally, or there was a shortfall in the literature. I do not accept that all of the very honourable professionals with whom I served are merely immoral, or too stupid to notice, or too hypocritical to care. Nor are they amoral in the Machiavellian realist sense; neither I, nor they, accept that there are no appropriate rules that should be governing this highly emotive and very difficult area of moral thinking.

This book is my contribution to evolving a better understanding of those rules, and why successive British governments have struggled to articulate nuclear deterrence policy, both internally and publicly. My core hypothesis is that there are always moral principles that apply to the use of force, but in situations of extreme peril – a supreme emergency – the consequences of failure may be so horrendous that action to avert it might exceptionally breach usually accepted norms of behaviour. For those involved in such decisions, moral discussion of those circumstances is complex enough in camera, has proven extremely demanding in Parliament and is increasingly becoming well-nigh impossible in modern media.

It is important at this stage to consider the concepts of ‘the public’ and ‘the media’. There is a great deal of very powerful analysis of both of these concepts, but I do not intend to address it here. The issues I do address tend to focus on how ‘the public’ and ‘the media’ were perceived by government and influenced government decision-making at particular times, so I have used a very reductionist view of both terms; ‘the public’ are those members of the British electorate who could vote in general elections. This includes active opponents of nuclear policy. ‘The media’ comprise those organisations that publish in print, radio, television or other digital means in order to inform or influence policy and ‘the public’. I have not referred to public opinion at all, other than when it is considered by government, because it too is a very nebulous concept, which of itself is not pertinent to the study I make here, other than when the evidence suggests that the government perception of public opinion specifically influenced government thinking.

This argument will proceed in five stages. Chapter one will consider the case of The War Game, a BBC documentary-drama that was made in 1965 but not shown on British TV until 1985. It illustrates clearly the close linkage between political perceptions of public understanding and opinions, the reticence of government (in its broadest sense) when it comes to public consideration of nuclear deterrence and the distortion that this reticence imposes on government presentation of policy.

The second stage (chapters two and three) is a historical retrospective which considers the moral debates associated with aerial bombardment in the First and Second World Wars. This complex morality was well understood by Prime Minister Churchill and his Cabinet, and the senior members of the armed forces who directed operations against the Nazi regime. Churchill advocated abrogation of neutral states’ rights in a note to Cabinet describing the concept of the ‘supreme emergency’ in December 1939:

Our defeat would mean an age of barbaric violence … we have a right, indeed are bound in duty, to abrogate for a space some of the conventions of the very laws we seek to consolidate and reaffirm … The letter of the law must not in supreme emergency obstruct those who are charged with its protection and enforcement … Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.¹

This view of a ‘supreme emergency’ and its relationship with moral constraint form the core thread of my argument.

The British government reacted with moral outrage to the German bombing of undefended British cities during the First World War (chapter two), but participated in the protracted and still hotly contested strategic bombing campaign of the Second World War which caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties in German cities. There were intense discussions in Cabinet, in the Air Staff and in Parliament about the moral implications of this campaign (chapter three). I do not seek to reach a definitive position on the morality of that campaign, but do endeavour to show that the British government’s public position on the capability of and intent behind the bombing campaign, certainly from 1943, bore little relation to its understanding of the strategic realities; and I argue that this was because of the difficulties of making a complex moral case in public.

The third stage (chapters four and five) charts the impact of this reticence as the UK developed a nuclear deterrent capability, and its impact on the excessive secrecy surrounding every aspect of British nuclear deterrence policy from the decision to develop a sovereign capability in 1947, via the decision to replace Polaris in 1980 and the protracted decision-making process to replace the Vanguard class submarines in the early 21st century.

The last two chapters of the book are more about the issues involved. The ethics of nuclear weapons policy are considered, both as deterrence policy evolved, and in the strategic environment in 2020. This leads to a consideration of the moral aspects of ‘wicked problems’: those complex decisions which have no simply good or bad outcomes, and the issues that this complexity poses for public policy. A short case study of government handling of another, equally complex, moral issue is considered in parallel. Intense public debate about in vitro fertilisation (IVF) between 1978 and 1982 led to the establishment of the Warnock Enquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology to investigate the social, ethical and legal implications of IVF. The Enquiry’s report was published in 1984 and led to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1991 – to no particular public interest or media hysteria. Yet it is clear that, despite the increased openness of the Thatcher years and the Open Government Documents of the 1980s, the government remained on the back foot with the public discourse on nuclear weapons policy.

The final chapter of the book will address 21st-century deterrence, and seek to place nuclear deterrence in its current strategic context. This highlights the linkage between ethics, culture, technology, domestic and international factors in the formulation of national security policy and the role of nuclear weapons within it, and the public presentation of that policy and strategy.

In short, this book is offered as a one-stop shop for the reader interested in nuclear deterrence in Britain, its derivation and role in strategy, and the broader interaction between the public and the government in formulating this cornerstone of British security policy. There are many very good, more detailed examinations of each of these factors, and I indicate suggestions where the reader might want to pursue more detail. In the end, though, this is a personal account; it portrays my understanding of why and how the UK procured and sustained a strategic nuclear deterrent, the moral issues involved, their relations with strategic decisions, the impact they had on the political decision-makers and the way successive governments felt able to portray these issues to the electorate.

Note

1Sir Winston Churchill, The gathering storm. New York: Rosetta Stone, 2009: 492.

1

The War Game, a case study

The fate of The War Game, a radical film about the effects of nuclear weapons, provides a clear illustration of the ambiguity of government engagement with the public on nuclear deterrence policy in the context of the height of the Cold War and puts into context the inquiry that the rest of this book seeks to address.

In May 1965, a fictional BBC television documentary-drama depicting the possible aftermath of a nuclear attack on Britain was completed and the initial draft shown to the Controller of BBC2, Huw Wheldon. Five months later, the BBC announced it had decided not to air the programme on television because it was an ‘artistic failure’.¹ It was subsequently given a limited cinematic release and won the 1966 Venice Film Festival Award for best documentary, and the best documentary Academy Award (Oscar) in 1967. Eventually, the BBC screened it on television on 31 July 1985, twenty years after its completion. To this day, its director insists that the film was suppressed because of its political impact.²

From the beginning Wheldon was well aware of the political impact that the film might have and insisted on close supervision of the filming process. The film’s director, Peter Watkins, had previously directed Culloden, a dramatic depiction of the defeat of the 1745 Jacobite rebels, and his film had been very well received critically and publicly. Watkins had a list of difficult topics which he wanted to address with his docu-drama format, both challenging received wisdom on the subject matter and stretching the use of television as a medium for entertainment and information. Watkins’s intent was to ‘challenge viewers’ assumptions and provoke different perspectives’.³ Top of his list was nuclear war.

Watkins’s research was meticulous, including interviews with survivors of Second World War mass bombing raids, both British and German, and members of the emergency and police services. He also sent a number of detailed questionnaires to government departments and local government offices regionally, inquiring specifically into the detailed preparations being made in civil defence during the early 1960s. From its very inception, The War Game was potentially contentious, politically; it set out to depict on television the aftermath of nuclear war in a way that directly challenged the official view.

Inherently pacifist, Watkins was perturbed by the lack of public information and understanding of the nature of nuclear war, and by the government claims about the effectiveness of preparations being made for civil defence within the United Kingdom. This is the central refrain of the film and is literally echoed by the narrator at the end of the film as the camera pans across a group of children orphaned by the nuclear attack:

On almost the entire subject of thermo-nuclear weapons; problems of their possession; effects of their use; there is now practically total silence; in the press, in official publications and on television. There is hope in any unresolved and unpredictable situation but is there a real hope to be found in this silence?⁴

The War Game is filmed using handheld cameras in a highly dynamic ‘newsreel’ style, closely reflecting the contemporary footage being returned from the conflict in Vietnam. The cast are almost all amateurs, locals of the town where the film was made. The film portrays plausible outcomes of a nuclear war, starting with the immediate aftermath of blast and heat; already well understood. The memories of the bombing raids of the Second World War were still vivid to many. The War Game specifically parodies the civil defence information films being produced by the Home Office; the narrator repeatedly uses the phrase ‘This is what nuclear war means’, which had been a central motif of Doom town, a 1955 Pathé civil defence training film depicting search and rescue in burned-out buildings.⁵

The government Civil Defence Corps had produced a number of training films and publicity ‘shorts’ in the 1950s and early 1960s.⁶ These films depicted civil defence exercises and scenarios which were scripted to run up to the evacuation of casualties to conveniently located first aid posts where assistance from unaffected areas was available. The rescue services always appeared in control and there was a clear message that civil defence was a viable response to a nuclear attack. The War Game scenario develops beyond this point and the film portrays the failure of the Civil Defence Corps to respond to the demands of ever-increasing casualties, including the inadequate provision of medical care, mercy killings of very seriously burned casualties by the police and mass cremations in order to prevent the spread of disease. As time passes in the film, the situation changes from one of immediate emergency to one of protracted crisis attributable to failure of the civil defence organisation, leading to food shortages, looting and finally the imposition of martial law on the streets; graphically depicted in the summary execution of food rioters by police firing squad.

Throughout, this fabricated newsreel footage is interspersed with interviews to camera of equally fictitious ‘establishment figures’ such as a bishop, government ministers, officials and senior military officers. These interviews, however, are filmed at desks or in offices and they rehearse genuine government statements on civil defence planning; assurances that procedures and processes are in place to ensure that nuclear war is survivable. Immediately after each official statement, the film depicts its ‘reality’, directly in counterpoint to the reassuring view of the ‘establishment figure’. This reality includes live unscripted interviews with members of the public who were actually participating in the filming. They were asked real questions and answered from their real viewpoints. Watkins later said ‘And those questions and responses – particularly the responses – are perhaps the biggest single indictment in the entire film of the way we are conducting our present society and of the lack of common public knowledge of the things which affect humanity’.⁷ Ultimately, the effect is that the fictional newsreel and interview footage completely discredits the genuine government statements and Civil Defence Organisation assurances.

The decision not to show The War Game

Even before filming started Wheldon had been in close liaison with Grace Wyndham Goldie (Head of Talks at the BBC) who supported the film in principle: ‘so long as there is no security risk and the facts are authentic, the people should be trusted with the truth …’⁸ This is the essential question here; assuming Watkins’s film was authentic, what was it that prevented government trusting people with the truth?

In parallel, there was an ongoing dialogue with the Home Office throughout filming, with Wheldon insisting on editorial independence despite:

… the Home Office argu[ing] that as ‘partners in the civil defence field’, the government and Corporation ought to work together throughout production to ensure that the film was ‘prepared with the utmost care and responsibility’ given its potentially harmful effects on the public.⁹

Despite Wheldon’s support, The War Game caused considerable unease within the BBC hierarchy during its production. Filming was completed in April 1965, and Watkins completed his initial editing by mid-June. The first cut was screened to Watkins’s panel of expert consultants on 17 June and to Wheldon and Richard Cawston (Wheldon’s replacement as Head of Documentaries) on 24 June. After each of these screenings, the film was edited further. After a further screening to BBC publicity officers, the re-edited film was viewed again by Cawston on 18 August, who gave the film a provisional broadcast date of 7 October, to be followed by Tonight. However, on 2 September, Hugh Carleton-Greene (BBC Director-General) and Lord Normanbrook (Chair of the BBC Board of Governors) viewed the film and decided to ‘take soundings’ from Whitehall. As an ex-Cabinet Secretary, and chair of the 1954 ‘Committee on Nuclear Defence and Civil Defence’, Normanbrook would have been very aware of the potential domestic impact of the film. He wrote to the Cabinet Secretary that the film:

… has been made with considerable restraint. But the subject is, necessarily, alarming; and the showing of the film on television might well have a significant effect on public attitudes towards the … I doubt that the BBC alone should take the responsibility of deciding whether this film should be shown …¹⁰

When informed of this decision by Wheldon, Watkins resigned over what he saw as political interference in the independence of the BBC.¹¹

On 24 September, The War Game was screened to senior government officials including the Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend, the Permanent Secretaries from the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence (MOD), and a senior officer representing the Chief of Defence Staff. Trend clearly understood the government position very well; he wrote in October to the Lord President and Prime Minister that The War Game was unbalanced and pessimistic about civil defence, but that ‘the dilemma for the government … was that it could not afford to give the impression that, by overriding the BBC’s duty to educate, it was sweeping under the rug an issue which ministers found politically embarrassing’.¹² Trend met Normanbrook again on 5 November and Normanbrook noted that the ‘… decision should be left to the discretion of the BBC … it is also clear that Whitehall will be relieved if the BBC chooses not to show it’.¹³ On 24 November, Normanbrook wrote to Trend to inform him that the BBC had decided not to show the film. A BBC press release on 26 November read ‘this is the BBC’s own decision … not as a result of outside pressure of any kind’.¹⁴ The Times reported this release, adding ‘… the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting’.¹⁵

There were questions asked about the degree of government involvement in the BBC’s decision in both Houses of Parliament, but government officials and ministers, including Prime Minister Harold Wilson, simply reiterated that ‘[a]s regards rumours about The War Game, the Government have not interfered at all’.¹⁶ Peter Watkins remains in absolutely no doubt that the government applied pressure to the BBC to inhibit the showing of The War Game.¹⁷

There was undoubtedly contact between the hierarchy of the BBC and very senior government officials prior to the decision being made. The extent to which that contact manifested as pressure on the BBC is unlikely ever to be established definitively from the official records. There is clearly a degree of historiographical debate about the exact decision-making process that resulted in the censorship of The War Game; at least three historians have independently assessed substantially the same evidence and reached substantively different conclusions. Chapman concludes ‘[t]hat there was pressure from Whitehall (not from Westminster) not to show the film cannot be doubted …’¹⁸

In a form letter sent to those who had written to the BBC to complain, the BBC wrote ‘There was an element of experiment in this project … Such programme experiments sometimes fail …’¹⁹ As shown above, this is not quite the view expressed by Lord Normanbrook; he had admitted on first seeing it that the film was an impressive documentary but he clearly had reservations about its political impact since he also insisted that the responsibility for showing it was too great for the BBC to shoulder alone. ‘In making this decision, the BBC had to set aside its own belief that the probable effects of nuclear warfare should be made known to the public, if at all possible, through the medium of television.’²⁰ This does appear to concur with Wyndham Goldie’s comment that the people should be trusted with the truth, but it then rather begs the question why the BBC had to set aside its own beliefs and not show the film. The BBC’s letter continued ‘most of those who saw it were very deeply affected, and believed that it had the power to produce unpredictable emotions and moral difficulties whose resolution called for balance of judgement of the highest order’.²¹

The War Game vividly challenged the sterile depictions of the aftermath of nuclear war shown in the Civil Defence Corps training films and the Pathé news reports. The opportunity to inform ‘balanced judgement of the highest order’ is exactly what Watkins was seeking to promote; a genuine debate about nuclear weapons policy. By not showing the film, the BBC did not provide that opportunity, and according to some commentators, deliberately stifled it: ‘… The War Game was censored for politically motivated reasons … the state was intimately involved in the BBC’s decision and that there was nothing ad hoc about the process’.²² The BBC had written in 1965: ‘The BBC has, therefore, reluctantly decided that, because of its nature, this film cannot be broadcast … In making this decision, the BBC acted on its own judgement. There was no outside pressure. In particular, we received no advice from Government Departments or officials about whether or not the film should be shown on the air.’²³ Shaw concludes that ‘[a]vailable records fail to make it clear precisely who took the decision to pull The War Game and when’.²⁴ Wayne’s article (quoted above) was a direct challenge to Chapman, but from their exchange the most salient point for this study is ‘[i]n its own way, Wayne’s passionate and polemical response is further evidence of the controversy that continues to surround the BBC’s decision not to broadcast The War Game …’²⁵

The BBC consulted government officials, who, whether or not they actually coerced the BBC decision, clearly felt that The War Game was in some way ‘hazardous’. The Cabinet Secretary’s memo to Wilson suggests that the Cabinet Office felt that the government was in a cleft stick; it could neither suppress the film (for fear of being accused of doing so), nor allow it to be aired (for fear of the concerns it would raise).²⁶

To date, the analysis of the events surrounding the suppression of The War Game has focused on the extent to which the government influenced the BBC decision. The debate quoted above concentrated on whether the government effectively compelled the BBC’s decision (Wayne) or was merely a more passive party to it (Chapman and to a lesser extent Shaw). There is, however, a clear consensus that the film was suppressed. But none of these articles addressed in any depth the assumption which underlies all three: why would the government want to suppress The War Game?

Much of the information associated with nuclear deterrence capability and limitations is necessarily very highly classified and therefore not at all appropriate for the public domain. In the middle of a war, even a ‘cold’ war, some information is just too sensitive for public dissemination. In 1962 five members of the radical anti-nuclear protest group the Committee of 100, who had protested outside nuclear and civil defence bases and thus compromised the bases’ locations, had been convicted of offences against the Official Secrets Act and had received custodial sentences.²⁷

As a result of a Cabinet Office study of 1955 (the Strath Report), the government knew all too well that civil defence procedures and capabilities were inadequate (this will be considered later in this book). The War Game promised to ridicule the claims of the Civil Defence Organisation and to challenge government claims that a nuclear war would be survivable. In particular, the loss of control by the Civil Defence Organisation and police forces reflected accurately the concept of ‘breakdown’ highlighted by the Strath Report and subsequently in very highly classified government studies: ‘when the government of a country is no longer able to ensure that its orders are carried out. This state of affairs could come about through breakdown of the machinery of control.’²⁸ Therefore it could have been argued that there was a national security issue raised by The War Game and the government did not want shortfalls to become public (or Soviet) knowledge; hence the desire to have it suppressed. But had security really been a salient issue, the government would have been able to stop transmission of The War Game through well-established ‘D-notice’ procedures, with none of the attendant publicity. There was no concern about security expressed in the government papers of the time; merely that The War Game exposed issues that might be ‘embarrassing’.

There was an ongoing debate within government as to whether spending on civil defence should be increased or whether to rely on investment in active elements of deterrence on the assumption that war could be deterred in the first place, and the need for civil defence obviated.²⁹ In general, government decisions about nuclear weapons policy had been kept within very limited circles since Churchill had authorised the Tube Alloys project in absolute secrecy in 1942: ‘Mr Churchill had vigorously insisted that knowledge of the atomic bomb be kept to the smallest possible circle of Ministers and advisers’.³⁰ Veteran parliamentarian Tony Benn notes that, as a junior MP in 1950, ‘I tried to put down a question about nuclear weapons, having discovered that the Labour government had built the atomic bomb without telling parliament. I was sternly rebuked by Attlee, which at the time was quite frightening.’³¹

During his second term as Prime Minister, Churchill was more open with Cabinet and Parliament about nuclear matters than Attlee had been, but even so there had been very limited public discourse on nuclear policy in the UK during the 1950s and 1960s. Even in the face of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s activities, which reached their peak at the turn of the decade, there was persistent government reticence about nuclear matters.

The fate of The War Game acts as a useful case study into this reticence. In February 1966, four months after the decision not to air The War Game, the BBC arranged a cinematic screening to an invited audience of MPs, journalists (mostly war correspondents) and others. It received reviews ranging from ‘a warning masterpiece; It may be the most important film ever made’³² to ‘muddle-minded Mr Watkins’³³ and ‘one ban the BBC need not have defended’.³⁴ In March 1966, the British Film Institute was given a limited licence to screen The War Game and it was granted an X certificate by the British Board of Film Censors: ‘… The War Game was a brilliant film which he [the secretary of the BBFC] thought should be shown in cinemas’.³⁵ On the basis of this cinematic release, The War Game was awarded ‘Best Documentary’ at the 1967 Academy Awards; ‘Best